Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  While the issue was the takeover of political power and the establishment of Soviet-style dictatorships, the communist party acted like a single body, without any trace of anarchy. The unifying feature was Stalinist dogma, the codified version of Leninism internalized by communist armies around the world. As if Stalinism were a revealed truth, the party members were expected to believe in its tenets with religious passion. Many accepted the complete renunciation of individual mental autonomy and served the “party” with the same zeal that an illuminated sect follows the dictates of a charismatic prophet. Indeed, a high percentage of mysticism existed in this abnegation, which bordered on absolute serfdom, but for the militants the experience was as an inebriating situation, a way of transcending any form of estrangement and achieving liberation through historical salvation.20

  Party militants were sincerely convinced that the Stalinist model of society, with its rigid planning of everything human beings needed and its overall unsparing indoctrination, dubbed the education of the “new man,” was superior to the conflict-ridden texture of the bourgeois world as exemplified by the contradiction between haves and have-nots and the perceived alienation of the intelligentsia. They thought importing the Soviet-style institutions to their countries would ensure modernization and rapid economic progress.

  To achieve those goals of economic progress and modernization, the various East European communist parties undertook a systematic destructive operation whose chief consequence was the suppression of the civil society. That was, indeed, the main purpose of totalitarian practice in this century: to annihilate the sources of human creativity, to separate individuals from one another while making them mutually inimical, and to replace collective bonds of solidarity and support with the supremacy of the party-state, acclaimed as omnipotent and omniscient. All previous associations and groups had to disappear. The values long held to be sacred—patriotism, family, national traditions—had to be redefined in the light of communist dogmas. An overhaul of each country’s cultural tradition and a revision of the moral postulates, including those derived from the European humanist tradition, were accomplished through the Marxist dogma of the class struggle.

  In countries where the social contrasts were often outrageous before World War II, the communists’ promises to defend the interests of the have-nots against the haves and to give selfless support to the social underdogs sounded appealing. They offered the intellectuals the opportunity to feel socially important and useful, and many intellectuals considered the chance a godsend.

  Likewise, the communists abused the confidence of the working class by announcing that their party was the repository of all human virtues and was predestined by history to become the ruling force in society. Party members penetrated and eventually controlled the trade unions, which they considered to be their “transmission belts” to the working class. In reality, despite their proletarian verbiage, the communists did not trust the class in whose name they were trying to take over power: For them the workers were simply a maneuverable mass, a passive and pliable crowd, incapable of understanding its own interests. The communists acted as a pedagogical minority, enthralled with its own mission and convinced that any opposition to their party’s designs was by definition criminal.

  THE COMINFORM AND THE TWO CAMPS THEORY

  Following the idyllic years 1944-45, when the Soviets claimed that they had no intent to establish Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, things started to change in 1946. The Cold War had become increasingly intense. The Civil War in Greece, which had started in 1944, entered a more violent stage, the West hardened its opposition to communist insurrectionary tactics in various countries, and Stalin came to the conclusion that it was high time to abandon any soothing rhetoric about popular fronts and national coalitions. In the Kremlin it was a time of savage power struggles. Two factions were vying for the upper hand in the aging despot’s entourage. On one side were the Moscow apparatchiks, headed by Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenty Beria. On the other, growing ever more obsessed with proving to Stalin their indefatigable commitment to the principles of international class struggle, were the former Leningrad party boss Andrei Zhdanov and his associates.21

  For Zhdanov, first the British commitment supporting the antiCommunist forces in Greece and then the United States’ decision to assist the economic recovery in Western Europe through the Marshall Plan were clear indications that the time for entente with the “bourgeois” former allies had come to an end. According to that high priest of Stalinist orthodoxy, a new stage in the irreconcilable struggle between the forces of peace and progress and those of reaction and war had begun. There was no longer any room for searches for “national roads to socialism.” The battle cry sounded by Zhdanov for all communists and “progressive forces” was to close ranks around the Soviet Union, “the fortress of mankind’s dreams of equality and happiness.” This theory formulated by Zhdanov, at the time Stalin’s chief lieutenant and the Kremlin’s ideological czar, would be the alpha and omega of communist internationalism until Stalin’s death in March 1953.

  Zhdanov spelled out his strategy of intensification of international class warfare and elaborated on its implications for Eastern Europe during a secret meeting that took place in Poland, at Szklarska Poreba, in September 1947. On that occasion, representatives of the Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, French, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Soviet, and Yugoslav communist parties gathered to discuss a common response to what Stalin had identified as the new aggressive behavior of American imperialism. The conclave culminated in the creation of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ parties with its headquarters in Belgrade. The creation of the new institution, usually referred to as the Cominform, indicated Moscow’s desire to contain the centrifugal trends within world communism. Although it was intended as a successor to the Comintern, it lacked the defunct International’s global stature and influence. For instance, it did not include some of the most influential parties engaged at that moment in civil wars (the Chinese and the Greek communist parties). Even more symptomatic was the absence of the Albanians and the East Germans, which meant the Cominform did not include all the actual or potential ruling European communist parties.

  The Yugoslav communists were among the most vocal in calling for coordinated actions against the West and charged their colleagues from Italy and France with “defeatism,” “capitulationism,” and “right-wing opportunism.” At the time of the secret meeting at Szklarska Poreba, Zhdanov’s prestige in the Soviet Union and among communists throughout the world was at its apex; only one year had passed since he had lambasted the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko for their deviations from the dogmas of socialist realism, according to which “the artistic representation of reality must be linked with he task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.”22 During the anticultural campaign of 1946, Zhdanov formulated a chauvinistic, intensely anti-Western theory of the Great Russian claim to moral superiority and the obligation of the intellectuals to conform strictly to party commands:

  Our literature, which reflects a state order of much higher standards than that of any bourgeois country and a culture which is much greater than that of bourgeois countries, has the right to instruct others in a new public morality. Where can you find such a nation and such a country as we have? Where can you find such splendid human qualities as were shown by our Soviet people in the Fatherland war? … The writer cannot follow events. He must be the first in the ranks of the people; he must show them the way of progress but be guided by the methods of socialist realism, study our reality conscientiously, and try to understand the basis of our growth and development.23

  During the Cominform’s foundation meeting, Zhdanov pushed through the adoption of a declaration to the effect that it was the USSR that embodied the truly humanistic goals of the anti-Nazi struggle, whereas the Western powers had opposed Hitler only for greedy, imperialistic reasons. Crammed with ideologic
al fictions and vengeful attacks on the West, the declaration was indeed a direct echo of the hardening of the Soviet domestic and international line. According to Stalin’s chief ideologue, the Soviet Union and other democratic countries had regarded as their basic war aims the restoration and consolidation of democratic order in Europe, the eradication of fascism, the prevention of any possibility of new aggression on the part of Germany, and the establishment of lasting all-around cooperation among the nations of Europe. On the other hand, Zhdanov maintained, the United States of America and Great Britain had set themselves another goal in the war: to rid themselves of competitors on the market (Germany and Japan) and to establish their dominant position. Zhdanov’s argument continued:

  This difference in the definition of war aims and tasks of the postwar settlement grew more profound after the war. Thus two camps were formed—the imperialist and antidemocratic camp, having as its basic aim the establishment of world domination for American imperialism and the smashing of democracy, and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp, having as its basic aim the undermining of imperialism, the consolidation of democracy, and the eradication of the remnants of fascism.24

  Zhdanov’s style was uniquely imperative and unambiguous. For him there was no middle road between Soviet-style socialism and Western capitalism. His Manichean vision found its corollary in the acceleration of the satellization process in Eastern Europe.25 The model then imposed on Eastern Europe consisted in an extremely violent social, economic, political, and cultural destruction of the old order; the elimination of all potential or real political enemies; and the complete regimentation of culture. The new structures erected on the ruins of those smashed and increasingly atomized societies had to be carbon copies of the Soviet ones: rubber-stamp parliaments, communist control over all spheres of life, the establishment of concentration camps for the extermination of politically unreliable elements, and the institution of a command economy, where private property was virtually eliminated and replaced by state ownership of all resources.

  In Romania, for instance, application of the model started in March 1945. Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinsky went to Bucharest and forced King Michael to appoint Petru Groza, a communist fellow-traveler, as the country’s Prime Minister. When the King initially refused, the Soviet prosecutor-turned-diplomat raised his voice and threatened direct Soviet intervention. In the meantime the communists mobilized their assault squads and instituted a state of terror in the whole country. So the King gave in to the diktat, and the country fell into the hands of a Soviet-appointed government. A communist, Teohari Georgescu, became Minister of the Interior, ensuring the further deterioration of the already suffering democratic system. The transition to Sovietism was completed in December 1947 with the King’s forced abdication and the proclaiming of a Romanian People’s Republic.

  Scenarios similar to the Romanian case can be detailed for most of Eastern Europe. In Hungary the communists waged a conquest of position, occupying one after the other all the vital centers of government. The communist leader Matyas Rakosi cynically referred to this “slicing off” of the non-Communist partners in the government coalition as “salami tactics.”26 Unlike the Hungarians, the Bulgarian communists used “frontist” tactics to emasculate their rivals and eventually to establish themselves in power.27 In Poland, the communists had reemerged during the war under the name Polish Workers’ Party, headed by the underground leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, and tried to appeal to the strong national sentiments of the population. It failed, however, to stir responsive chords among the masses, who continued to see the communists as the tool of the Soviet government. Having direct Soviet support and holding the key ministries, the communists engaged in a violent “pacification” by organizing a harsh repression against the last pockets of anticommunist armed resistance. A keen observer of Polish politics noted that:

  … in the immediate postwar years, the Communist Party and its allies commanded no significant popular support in the country. The great majority of Poles remained loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile and, subsequently, supported the opposition led by the Polish Peasant Party. The Communist regime in Poland was entrenched in power only after a prolonged and, at times, fierce struggle between the Polish Workers’ Party, openly assisted by the Soviet military might, and the anti-Communist political forces supported by the overwhelming majority of the Polish people.28

  An element that ensured the vitality of the Polish anticommunist resistance was the intransigent conduct of the Catholic Church. Its supranational status, represented by subordination to the Vatican, was a source of international support at a time when the communists were trying to sever any link between local groups and institutions and the outside world. For the decades to come, the beleaguered Catholic Church would symbolize the last stronghold of Poland’s civil society.

  The last to fall victim to the communists’ subversive tactics was Czechoslovakia. In February 1948 mass demonstrations were staged to compel noncommunist ministers to resign because of their alleged conspiratorial activities. President Eduard Benes had to yield to the communist leader Klement Gottwald’s ultimatum. Benes asked Gottwald to form a new government without representatives of the democratic parties. Communist propaganda insisted that the takeover in Czechoslovakia had occurred in a nonviolent, constitutional way. The truth, however, was that the communists had prepared themselves for a military showdown with the democratic forces and that militia units were ready for action in factories throughout the country. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin’s presence in Prague at the moment of the putsch contributed to the psychological pressure on the opposition. Writing twenty years after the February coup, during the Prague Spring of 1968, a participant in the takeover admitted:

  We gave a distorted picture of the February story …. The true history of February, I feel, has never been faithfully narrated; only now are conditions ripening in which a critical study, among other things, could and should be made of the errors and half-truths and untruths uttered about February 1948, both at home and abroad.29

  The Soviets even devised a theory to describe the nature of these new regimes in Eastern Europe: According to Zhdanov, those governments were not full-fledged “dictatorships of the proletariat” but experiments in a new political formula called “people’s democracy.” Even the Cominform’s official newspaper reflected the new political formula in its name—For a Lasting Peace, for People’s Democracy—a long title apparently invented by Stalin himself. This awkward name was an attempt to force the Western media, whenever they cited the Cominform’s organ, to repeat its slogans.

  Like the name of the Cominform’s newspaper, the Prague coup of February 1948 was tied to Stalin’s anxiety over the temptation of the East European communist elites to accept the Western offer for assistance through the Marshall Plan. With the temptation of the Marshall Plan beckoning, Stalin thought it was time to stop encouraging or accepting any policy initiatives on the part of local communists. An important conclusion to draw from Stalin’s reaction is that the Cominform came into being in order to coordinate, in keeping with the Soviet interpretation of the shifts in the international balance of power, both the domestic and the foreign policies of the newly established regimes. In Stalin’s view, the imperialist contradictions were bound to intensify, the attacks on socialist countries were likely to be more violent and frequent, and no one could be permitted to break ranks at that particularly dangerous juncture.

  Tito enthusiastically supported Stalin’s new orientation but thought the moment was propitious for furthering his own hegemonic agenda. Ironically, it was precisely at the moment when the Soviet and the Yugoslav perspective on international class warfare were in the closest alignment that the clash between the two countries inevitably occurred. Tito ignored Stalin’s jealous behavior and initiated a project for the creation of a Danubian confederation, including Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and possibly Romania. Tito’s secret contacts with the veteran Mos
cow-trained Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov were correctly perceived by Moscow as a challenge to its overall supremacy, not only within the camp but also within the world communist movement.

  Stalin could not bear the rise of a parallel center of power and initiative within world communism. He intensified his efforts to tame Yugoslavia’s rebellious leadership. An exchange of letters between the Kremlin and Tito was begun, but to no avail. The dice had been cast, and there was no way for the Yugoslav heretic to back down. Once he had told Stalin that he rejected Moscow’s condescending tutelage, he had sealed his fate and had turned into the Soviet dictator’s worst enemy, a diabolical reincarnation of Menshevism, Trotskyism, and all the other “deviations” Stalin had managed to eradicate in the Soviet Union.

  The conflict with Yugoslavia and Tito’s excommunication from the Cominform in June 1948 gave the signal for the beginning of dramatic purges within the East European communist parties. It also indicated that Moscow’s hegemony could not completely suppress domestic tendencies even within the most pro-Soviet communist formations. After all, Tito had dedicated all his life to the communist cause. He was a man with impeccable Stalinist credentials, so, in Stalin’s eyes, Tito’s unique fault was the desire to maintain his own and Yugoslavia’s limited autonomy relative to the Kremlin.